An Ambiguous Animal

As promised, here's my carved cat's head bead. I went through a brief beading phase a couple years ago. It coincided with a carving phase, which makes sense if you know that my dad spent eight years in the South Pacific carving mammoth ivory necklace charms. The two things are linked in my mind that way.

My carving has been very limited. I have a half-finished gargoyle bookend and chunk of yew wood predestined to become a flying pig sitting 2000 miles away in my dad's woodshop. Hopefully this fine woodworking workshop I'm taking will improve matters some.

This cat head bead is the only carving I've completed. (I haven't even finished carving a bar of soap.) My boyfriend is a luthier, so I got a couple small chunks of mahogany from him and borrowed his Dremel. I drilled the hole first so that I knew it would be straight and then carved it with the ubiquitious #11 Exact-O knife architecture students wield. (It's loosely based on a brown tiger-striped cat that used to live with me by the name of Milo, an excellent winter foot-warmer.) I sanded it, painted it with oils and gave it a polyeurythane finish so that the pigment couldn't fall off the un-primed wood. I let it dry on a bent paperclip and put the bead drop on it so that the cat wasn't always looking up at me.

Some people have suggested it doesn't look like a cat, more like a fox or something. That may be; the muzzle is a bit narrow. But I'm happy enough with the results anyway.